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Unit of study_
FILM3006: Cinematic Ecologies
2025 unit information
This unit explores cinema's engagement with earth's ecologies, from its environmental impacts as a resource-intensive industry, to its capacity to shape human perceptions and relations to the more-than-human world. From the ocean waves and fluttering leaves that captivated early film audiences, to contemporary representations of ecological collapse, this unit tests film's capacity to transform the centrality of 'the human', and to activate non-anthropocentric approaches to ecological renewal. A range of critical approaches to film, including ecocriticism, animal studies and posthumanism, will be used to illuminate diverse moving-image case studies.
Unit details and rules
Managing faculty or University school:
Arts and Social Sciences
| Study level | Undergraduate |
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| Academic unit | Film Studies |
| Credit points | 6 |
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Prerequisites:
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12 credit points at 2000 level in Film Studies |
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Corequisites:
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None |
| Prohibitions:
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None |
| Assumed knowledge:
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None |
At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:
- LO1. Demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of cinema’s historical and contemporary engagements with ecologies, environments and animals
- LO2. Engage with current theoretical approaches concerning the intersections between cinema, environment, and non-human life
- LO3. Demonstrate complex, subtle analyses of practices of framing across documentary, fiction, and experimental cinema
- LO4. Produce peer-reviewed and independent, creative and analytical, content in visual, written and spoken formats
- LO5. Demonstrate a self-reflexive understanding of your own role and capacity as a cultural agent to intervene in scholarly, practitioner and activist work on climate change and other ecological issues.
Unit availability
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